Grover Norquist Wants Vapers to Save the G.O.P.

Norquist thinks that e-cigarette users could form part of a new “Leave Us Alone Coalition.”

Photograph by Aaron Bastin / Alamy

As a political trend spotter, the lobbyist Grover Norquist has a formidable record. Three decades ago, he founded Americans for Tax Reform, a fanatical anti-tax group that inspired “60 Minutes” to describe him, years later, as “responsible, more than anyone else, for rewriting the dogma of the Republican Party.” In 1994, he co-authored, with Newt Gingrich, the Contract with America, which became the Party’s central manifesto for the decade, and, later, he was an early backer of Texas governor George W. Bush for President.

Nobody gets every prediction right (Norquist backed Scott Walker for President), but it pays to keep track of what Norquist is tracking. A couple of years ago, he seized on a peculiar storm in an obscure local election in New Mexico. “We heard about a New Mexico state legislator who got defeated because she said, ‘I'm going to ban vaping,’ ” he told me in a conversation this week. To be precise, the New Mexico representative Liz Thomson had announced her plan to tax e-cigarettes and impose a ban on their use in restaurants and other businesses. The vaping world, which consists of about ten million or so e-cigarette users and the industry that has sprung up to serve them, mobilized.

The American E-Liquid Manufacturing Standards Association donated to a get-out-the-vote campaign on behalf of Thomson’s opponent, Conrad James. Moreover, vapers and their advocates organized roughly a thousand phone calls to encourage turnout. “Money poured in from all these vapers around the country,” Norquist said. It worked; Thomson was defeated by a margin of just three hundred and thirty-six votes.

Norquist was taken aback by the depth of emotion; vapers described a seemingly banal political issue in deeply personal terms. “We ran into people saying, ‘Do you know they're attacking us?’ ” he said. “We started getting invited to vaping conventions. I spoke in Florida to people who run vaping stores. These are all, by definition, new entrepreneurs, or at least this is a new thing they do.” He latched on to more local disputes. “There was a Republican Attorney General who passed some goofy vaping regulatory law in Indiana, and got beat trying to run for Congress,” he said. In a kerfuffle in Washington State, hundreds of vapers turned up at a rally at the state capitol to protest a proposed law. “I've never, ever seen cigarette smokers show up in a state legislature by the hundreds. Vapers do.”

When I asked Norquist if he has received money to promote vaping, he said, “We've done stuff with them where they picked up the cost, but it's not like some big trade association or something. There's lots of little guys.” For Norquist, who raises a great deal of money, some of these terms may be relative; his backers have included the Koch brothers and tobacco companies. But by his account most of his advocacy in this area is covered by his broader anti-tax campaign. Promoting vaping, he said is “not an expensive project.”

At a moment when the traditional Republican consensus has been shattered by the rise of Trump and by populist rage against immigration and free trade, Norquist senses the emergence of a potential new coalition, populated by demographic interest groups that could be the latest heirs to the soccer moms of 1996 and the NASCAR dads of 2004. “It's like when I realized the Tea Party thing was real,” he said. “One theory is that the Party is a three-legged stool: economic conservatives, foreign-policy conservatives, and social conservatives. But I said, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ Foreign-policy conservatives? Do you invade Iraq or not? That doesn't tell you anything. ‘Social conservatives.’ What do you mean? What's the definition of that?”

In many ways, the 2016 race has retired the myth of “social conservatism” as a driver of Party loyalty; millions of Republican evangelicals have lined up behind a serial adulterer with a laughable unfamiliarity with the Bible who has, at times, called himself pro-choice. Norquist says it’s a fantasy to expect Hispanic voters to support a party that has embraced a hard line on immigration. “I have people who say, ‘Hispanics go to church and they're pro-life.’ You go and say, 'Hi. I'm here to talk to you about how you're pro-life and I'm pro-life, and you want religious liberty and I want religious liberty, but, while we talk, Igor here is going to go out and take your mom and drive her down to Texas and across the border.’ ”

Instead of trying to organize an increasingly diverse nation of voters around a vague notion of cultural and social conservatism, Norquist wants to cultivate a consensus around what he sees as the passion behind the everyday demands that attract a vaper to a rally at the state capitol: contempt for government interventions in one's personal life. He imagines the formation of a “Leave Us Alone Coalition.”

“Go to, say, homeschoolers," he said. "Two million kids are homeschooled. The teachers’ union runs the other team”—the Democratic Party—“so that team offers nothing to the homeschoolers. Next, go to the Second Amendment community.” He doesn’t mean just the members of the National Rifle Association, since Republicans will likely get those votes anyway; he means America’s concealed-carry permit holders, the growing ranks of men and women who might never pick up a hunting rifle but have chosen to define themselves by carrying a gun in daily life. “The shock troops of the Second Amendment community are the fourteen and a half million concealed-carry permit holders,” he said. “Hunters like their shotguns, and on certain weekends in the fall they go annoy Bambi's relatives, but concealed-carry-permit people carry a gun with them. It's in the car. It's in the purse. It's in the small of the back.”

He continued down a list of narrow additions to his consortium of what might be called life-style Republicans: “The Uber driver. The Lyft driver. The labor unions don't like this. They think you should have to be an employee and work eight hours a day, and have this regulated. But if you say, ‘That's not me. I've got a second job,’ well, you're out,” he said. “In New York, Airbnb has been outlawed except in rare circumstances. So the Uber driver, the Lyft driver, the Airbnb person, the vaper, the concealed-carry person. Homeschooling was illegal in forty-eight states thirty years ago. Concealed-carry permits didn't really exist in any meaningful form thirty years ago. Vaping didn't exist ten years ago. Airbnb and Uber didn't exist ten years ago. This is a new collection of people.”

This eclectic coalition would also draw strength, he said, from class resentment. “It helps the vaping community that the high-brow guys are looking down on them. I tweeted on the vaping issue, and two of the tweets got more than two thousand retweets.”

To Norquist, protecting life-style politics could be the conservative version of the left’s insurgent success around same-sex marriage. “When you mess with life-style issues, you lose. The guys for whom it's a life-style issue beat the guys for whom it's an opinion.”

The rise of Trump exposed the Republican Party’s failure to understand its own electorate. In Norquist’s view, if it’s to reinvent itself, as it once did around Reagan’s anti-tax agenda or with the Contract with America, the Party needs to stop telling voters what should make them angry—and start listening to why they already are. “You can't keep people unhappy about a mosque being built in New York, because they don't live in New York. They wouldn’t see it anyway. People can get quote-unquote ‘worked up’ on something. But it's not, at the end of the day, a vote-moving issue.”